Angel Olsen interview

SONIC BLOOM

The casual intensity of indie songstress Angel Olsen

by Matt Ashare |    

Published February 12, 2014 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/front_row/

Angel Olsen finds a voice of her own on Burn Your Fire For No Wintess

When singer-songwriter Angel Olsen first emerged in 2010, with a cassette-only EP titled Strange Catcti, it was fairly easy to typecast her as one of the new breed of aspiring Americana artists. She’d in the midst of what might best be characterized as a indie-rock internship with Will Oldham, a mercurial underground icon who’s been navigating a skewed path between rootsy folk and countrified punk since the early ’90s under various guises — initially as Palace Brothers, then as Palace Music, and, for the last 15 years, as Bonnie “Prince” Billy. But the songs on Strange Cacti, released by the tiny Asheville label Bathetic Records, suggested a fairly straightforward, homespun approach to confessional, heart-on-the-sleeve, strum-and-twang songwriting. And, her full-length debut, 2012’s Half Way Home, recorded with help from Oldham collaborator and guitarist Emmett Kelly, largely confirmed that impression, drawing comparisons both to Patsy Cline and Joni Mitchell.

         But, with her forthcoming sophomore disc, the somewhat cryptically titled Burn Your Fire For No Witness, Olsen changes things up just a bit. With the help of a modest yet agile backing band (drummer Josh Jaeger and bassist Stewart Bronaugh, who also adds guitar), Olsen broadens her gritty sonic vistas, steering her disarmingly raw, introspective close-ups of unsettled emotions onto rockier terrain, without abandoning the casual intimacy she’s been cultivating all along.

         “I quit my dreaming the moment that I found you,” she intones dreamily, over spare, undulating guitar chords on the album’s brief, pensive opening track, a song that aptly comes across as the haunted whisper before the scream. “I started dancing just to be around you/Here’s to thinking that it all meant so much more/I kept my mouth shut and opened up the door.”

Churning guitars and a muscular backbeat rise to the fore as the album shifts gears, moving beyond reflection on the more volatile “Forgiven/Forgotten,” a short shot of rock therapy anchored in Olsen’s candid cries of “I don’t know anything.” And, then she’s on to tearing a page, and a phrase, out of the Hank Williams songbook, admitting “I feel so lonesome I could cry” in the opening verse of the slow swinging “Hi-Five,” a relatively cheerful lament in which the singer finds solace in the company, if not the arms, of a fellow lost soul. “Now we don’t have to take it to extremes,” she croons, “We’ll keep our legs and arms and lips apart/But I’m giving you my heart. . . Are you giving me your heart?”

Olsen, who marks the release of “Burn Your Fire” this Tuesday by kicking off a national tour with her band at the Southern in Charlottesville, grew up in St. Louis, but it was in Chicago that she discovered her voice as a singer-songwriter. “Chicago is kind of where I found my own personality,” Olsen explains, over the phone from her new home base in Asheville, NC. “I mean, everyone in the scene there kind of works on projects together, like jazz musicians often sit in with indie rockers, and that kind of thing.”

It was in that collaborative atmosphere that Olsen found her way into the orbit of Will Oldham and one of his more elaborate Bonnie “Prince” Billy projects. Along with recording a new album of original material that would feature Olsen — 2010’s The Wonder Show of the World — Oldham was putting together a backing band with Emmett Kelly to explore his fascination with the avant-rock of the 1979 album Babble, a cult classic produced by British-born art provocateur Kevin Coyne, featuring the German singer Dagmar Krause.

“I was working at a café where I’d play house shows all the time,” Olsen recounts. “A friend introduced me to Emmett Kelly, and I ended up keeping in touch with him and sending him some of my music. A few months, or maybe even a year went by and he got back in got in touch with me about singing the part of Dagmar Krause in this cover band idea that he and Will had. They were looking for female singer to do the Krause parts. I hadn’t done anything that was super loud or theatrical in a long time, but I said yes. I have no idea how they heard Dagmar Krause or anything that would convince them that I could do that kind of screaming vocal from the songs I sent them. But I took it as a complement. It was a good challenge for me.”

Being, as she puts it, “23 among all these grown-up men,” and having the opportunity to perform Oldham’s songs in the studio and on stage for several years, turned out to be a valuable tutorial for Olsen. “I learned a lot about my voice by doing Will’s songs,” she explains. “I was singing his words loud and strong, and I was taking chances. I started to think, ‘why can’t I do this with my own music?’”

Olsen’s willingness to experiment — to gently push at the boundaries of expectation — is reflected in the mix of styles that coalesces on Burn Your Fire, from the hushed and moody monochrome of the skeletal “White Fire,” to the more raucous psychedelic shadings of “High & Wild,” to the wounded, full-throated country-rock of “Lights Out.” At the same time, it’s an album that makes it a little harder to neatly or reflexively peg Olsen as a particular kind of indie songstress, even if it is tempting to cast a wide net over an entire subset of neo-folk performers who have also been associated with Oldham. Like, for example, the harpist Joanna Newsom.

“I think when you work with Will and with that group, it’s kind of unavoidable that you’re going to be compared with people who are part of that group of musicians,” Olsen reflects. “And, because I’m female, it’s easy to compare me to other women who are writing their own songs. So, I just accept that that’s what people do.

But, I don’t play the harp,” a bumused Olsen points out. “And, I don’t really feel that I’m doing the same thing as, say, Joni Mitchell, even if I do have a dynamic voice that I sometimes choose to use in uncontrolled, weird ways. People just find it easier to put artists in a category, and I totally see the use of it. I do it all the time myself. I remember playing a show a long time ago in Florida, and some girl came up to me afterwards and said that I sounded like Gwen Stefani. I’m not sure what she was talking about, but I took it as a complement. I guess she was just drawing on a small sample group of music that she’d heard.”